18.7 Running Reports Through a Web Service

In many cases, reports are integrated components of some larger application rather than a standalone application themselves. Hence, it can be useful to generate report requests from within an application. We accomplish this goal by exposing Oracle Reports Services as a Web service. This Web service may then be called from within any Web service-aware environment (for example, a Java application). For example, suppose that you have a Java-based expense reporting form and you want to allow users to generate a PDF version of their expense reports from it each time that they complete an expense form in your system. By creating a Java proxy Oracle Reports Web Service, you could then easily reference it from your Java development environment (for example, Oracle JDeveloper) and add a button that invokes Oracle Reports Services to generate the PDF file.